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I Keep Returning To This Line In My Childhood

I keep returning to this line in my childhood
I once stood in one dreaded day
every month with my mother
to prove I was loyal and reliable,
waiting for food at what was
back in the late fifties
called the Foodstall.
Though we were not animals.
We were simply poor
at the mercy of the God-wielding charities
and though it’s nowhere near the same degree
as it is of kind, we almost felt
like natives in the hands of the Catholic church.
Mostly separated mothers left in the lurch of love
with two or three whining kids
that were plague rats of measles,
mumps, ringworm, and cold sores,
agitated as electrons wanting to jump orbitals.
Natives, dried-out rummies
with faces like desiccated orange peels,
more alcoholics than druggies back in those days,
the addle-brained with psyches like quicksand
they kept falling into, some lambs
and some the tigers
that wouldn’t lie down with them.
Lonely bachelors that came out
of their self-imposed exiles
once a month to this lottery of foodstuffs
they carried home in a big brown
Vancouver refinery two ply paper white sugar bag
stitched together like the parched skins of mummies,
as if they were carrying a woman back to their place
like one of the Sabine maidens they’d snatched
to populate Rome with their solitude.
Women with too much make-up on,
a lot of them bruised,
their black eyes waxing from dark blue
to the festering yellow of ruined orchids,
as my mother’s used to
before my old man left for good.
A few boisterous madames
with chameleonic hair
that changed colour every month,
laughing and talking too loud
as if to show the more righteous among mothers
how free and flamboyant and flaunting they were
in the face of anyone’s disapproval,
as if they always had a trick up their sleeve,
though that wasn’t always the case
or they wouldn’t be standing there with us.
I keep returning to this line in my childhood
as if it held me no matter
how hard I’ve struggled to get off it
like a spinal cord tied to a kite and a key
that’s dangerously exposed to the lightning.
Shame. Humiliation. Guilt.
Though God knows for what
when you’re a child
trying to figure out what you did,
thinking you must be evil because you can’t.
Three hundred people lined up for hours
like a caterpillar that went around the block
exposed to public scrutiny
that felt it had a right to stare
because they were doing their share
and from the looks of things, we weren’t.
though I saw what bleach can do
to a woman’s knees and knuckles
when she was trying to raise four kids
by scrubbing a rich woman’s floors.
There are bitter moments in life
that can burn holes in your heart
like the Taliban splashing acid
in the eyes of a young girl who can read.
My mother could paint.
But not with her hands bleeding and raw.
Not with her mind and heart
scorched with anxiety
like a hot iron branding an ironing board
like another steer in the herd.
Even writing about it
I am depressed by the ferocity
of my boyish helplessness fifty years later,
as I stand beside her
to help her carry the bag home,
slabs of black bear meat
with tufts of hair still on it
haemorrhaging through the paper,
that would rip open
like the stitching of a wound
in the side of the lunar bull of abundance
Mithras Tauroctonus killed,
partially bruised vegetables and fruit,
usually a small bag of day old donuts,
two loaves of bread, leprous margarine
with a packet of orange dye
to mix into it for a little local colour,
sugar and canned spaghetti,
macaroni with powdered cheese,
brown potatoes sprouting
virginal green tendrils for tails
that made them like giant sperm,
would come pouring out of it
and scatter all over the sidewalk
to deepen the spectacle
of our monthly fertility ritual.
Everything was second hand,
even our food.
Even the way we felt about ourselves
for living the way we had to.
Everything shabby, used, abused
with an aura of ruin about it
you couldn’t get out of your heart,
your psyche, your clothes,
like the smell of death
in the upholstery of a car
where someone had died at the wheel
at the side of the road three days ago.
Street shrinks by seven,
pessimist philosophers by eleven,
even the children reeking of experience,
their innocence rooted like mushrooms
that came up overnight
in the compost heaps of life.
I stood like a pawn beside
the dethroned queen of my mother
and thought one day all this will be reversed
and those who were blessed
and didn’t pass it on
would later be cursed for realizing
too late the hard way,
that you really can’t hang on to anything
in this world of change,
this cosmic hour glass
shaped like lungs,
the valves of the heart
that keep reversing themselves,
that you haven’t already given away
just like your last breath
to make room for more.
Even in the spring,
even in the sweltering heat of summer,
wet winter days when the leaves
were plastered like collages
of artists in despair to the sidewalks,
after the cross burnt the scarecrow
as the strawdog of an idolatrous heretic,
we were always the last birds allowed in
to glean what was left of Eden,
before the hunger of winter
closed it down again and the tourists
went home to their homelessness with the poor.
And the seagulls and the mice
and the feral cats and the rats
that always seemed to have
so much more right to be there than we did
waiting for the loaves and fishes
to be broken on the hillside
though we were made to stand for hours
on heel-numbing cement designed
to torment your feet by standing
in place too long as the line
inched its way up the the front
like a millipede of people
growing nasty and impatient
to get what they needed to get
of what was left, then get gone
as fast as they could not to belong
to the bottom feeders in the same lifeboat
they’ve just been standing among.
And though my mother didn’t say much,
standing there in her isolationist silence,
there was always a troupe
of housewives in kerchiefs,
turning the trivial gossip of a reality show
into a running sore soap opera
they improvised from one end of the line
right up to the time the door opened
to let them in and they left the stage
to get down to the serious busy
of picking out the best turnips
and the less stale loaves of bread
suspecting the Elk’s Lodge ladies
had stashed the freshest for themselves
as a spiritual perk for all their altruism
that remotely tasted like vinegar
mixed with the deathly sweetness
of the canned milk of human kindness
as if one too many flies and angels
had dipped their wings in it
so that by the time it got to us
or we to it, it was an albino oil slick
from a cow that jumped over the moon
in total eclipse. Circus tricks,
hoops of fire with ringmasters
the barnyard made the caged tigers
jump through once a month
through the endless zeroes
of a slinky wound around the block
that had swallowed all of us heart first
like a multi-headed hydra
with a bellyful of hungry people
in a line that’s only grown longer over the years.

poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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